Autopilot: A Tale of The Near Future

from Hemmings Motor News

Like a school of fish, communicating among themselves via nigh-imperceptible cues, traffic performed its dance on the highway, merging, accelerating, braking in concert, slipping easily through lanes. Ofttimes the cars came so close to one another you'd think fenders would collide and the whole ballet would come to an end like a house of cards, but they pull it off each time and continue uninterrupted.
It takes a fair amount of both luck and skill to navigate traffic on your own nowadays. Some call it suicide, but it really is a simple matter of timing and pattern recognition and leaving constantly recalculating computers to dust up after your missteps. In some ways, it's actually easier to recognize the complex patterns inherent to the computers' programming than it is to try to recognize human behavior patterns. Take the merge, for instance: Humans go bonkers when there's a lane drop, speeding up to jockey for position, then letting off the accelerator at the last minute as they chicken out. Nowadays, cars zipper up as they taught us to do in driver's ed all those decades ago, mechanically and without any nonsense.
Which is not to say all is hunky-dory on the highway. There remain a handful of us dedicated to driving ourselves, without any computer interference. We cringed at reports of Google and DARPA creating autonomous vehicles just after the turn of the century, but thought it was merely more pie-in-the-sky, look-at-what-we-can-do engineering experiments, much like the jet-age gee-whiz electronic-eye-highway prognostications a half-century before that we handily ignored. It's useless to debate whether our concern could have prevented what happened next: highway lanes reserved for autonomous vehicles only, followed by entire highways so designated; autonomous vehicle technology beginning as production options on luxury cars first, followed by mid-level and economy cars, followed by making it standard, followed by locking out any manual control options; laws and regulations that first permitted, then mandated autonomous vehicles, completely outlawing any human-piloted vehicle; societal adjustment to the near-elimination of traffic fatalities and drastically increased highway speeds.
We marveled at how we could achieve wondrous fuel efficiencies, at how we could expand from the suburbs into the exurbs, at how we could fit more face time and work hours into the day by repurposing our commutes. All the while, we ignored the lessons of the last century, the dark sides of increased mobility that threatened to disconnect us from the ideals of our forefathers and leave behind those who couldn't keep up with the new society.
The inevitable backlash perhaps took place too late in the scheme of things. Organization would be too risky, so those of us unenchanted by the new technologies took to the internet to swap plans and instructions for bypassing the autonomous logic circuits in our cars. From museums and dusty garages we broke out those old cars--the ones with the manually shifted transmissions and accelerator pedals and steering wheels--to go for joyrides at night on the roads that the modern navigation systems decreed useless for utmost route efficiency. We even began hacking into the software and firmware to adjust the timing and fuel-injector pulsewidths of the internal combustion engines in our cars.
Eventually, we were found out through fender benders and OEM investigations. Other motorists might have regarded us merely as troublemakers, but our officials considered us a danger. Traffic cops, once thought obsolete, began to once again patrol the highways with network sniffers to make sure every car is connected to the grid. We fought back with network signal generators designed to emulate the autonomous cars around us, but the cops responded in kind, and nobody knows how long the battle will escalate.
But we continue regardless, and as we do so, facing the sure extinction of our line of thinking, we can only hope that future generations will learn from our mistakes.

This article originally appeared in the June, 2012 issue of Hemmings Motor News.